Honest question. Do you think the GNOME project is as healthy today as it was, say, 4 years ago? Benjamin Otte explains that no, it isn't. GNOME lacks developers, goals, mindshare and users. The situation as he describes it, is a lot more dire than I personally thought.

If one created an extension that would provide a 3 top level menu with a bottom taskbar just like GNOME 2 was, under GNOME Shell, it would help to keep the people interested. There are some extensions that can mimick menus and so on, but they're not the same as GNOME 2. I am talking about a full clone of the GNOME 2 top level menus: Applications - Places - System. Of course we would also want to have all the window title buttons back and our window list at the bottom.

That is what Cinnamon in Linux Mint is all about.

Only problem with that is you need to rewrite the Gnome Shell extensions...ugh!

I think it's wiser to fork and mod XFCE because this route should be shorter. XFCE is faster than GNOME 2 and much faster than GNOME 3. I don't think it's that difficult to get XFCE on par with GNOME 2 as in look & feel and also replacing some default applications.

Cinnamon is just like a 10 hour emergency surgery that will lead the patient to be unable to have full recovery. Projects like MATE certainly need Linus Torvalds himself to 'take on' the lead so that it could mean something to everyone in Linux ecosystem.

Unity and GNOME Shell were a major punch on the face and we all went to the ground. We're getting up, trying to recover, and a bit dizzy. The purpose of so many mistakes surrounding the DE communities are to reevaluate our thinking.

For the time being, it will be CentOS and favourite applications compiled on /opt